Library Guides: Art and Art History: Home

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Start Your Research with Library Databases - Art and Art History

Academic Search Complete

scholarly and peer-reviewed journals - a good choice for most topics

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Gale Ebooks: Virtual Reference Library

access to online reference books about business, environment, history, literature, medicine, multicultural studies, nation & world, and science

Credo Reference

features encyclopedia and other references sources - a good starting point for getting background information and a big-picture overview of your topic

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Watch Films - Art and Art History

Art and Architecture - Films on Demand

Watch award-winning documentaries and educational programs about art appreciation, art history, photography, applied art, and more.

Art History - Academic Video Online (AVON)

Streaming video from well-known producers like BBC, PBS, and History.

Many art museums host images of and information about artworks in their collections on their own websites. Below is a selection of the digital collection search of some notable international museums:

National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.)
NGA Images offers more than 51,000 open access digital images of artworks from the National Gallery of Art's collection.
National Gallery (London) - Paintings
Find paintings from the Western European tradition from the 13th to the 19th centuries.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met)
Met Museum Open Access provides access to over 400,000 high-resolution digital images of artworks from their collection.
The Getty Museum
The Getty Open Content Program offers access to over 100,000 digital images of artworks from their collection, including paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, and more.
The British Museum
The British Museum's Collection Online provides access to over 4.5 million objects, including images, with a focus on world history and culture.
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Open Access Initiative provides access to millions of digital assets from the Smithsonian's museums, including images, 3D models, and data.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
LACMA's Collections Online provides access to over 80,000 high-resolution images of artworks from their collection.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
MoMA's Collection Online offers access to over 85,000 images of artworks from their collection, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, and more.
Art Institute Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago's Collection offers access to over 52,000 images of artworks including paintings, sculptures, prints, and decorative arts.
Rijksmuseum (Netherlands)
Rijksmuseum's Rijkstudio offers high-resolution images of artworks from their collection, with over 700,000 artworks available for free download and creative use.

Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. Contains over 94 million copyright free image and media files.
Creative Commons Search Portal
Creative Commons is a system of licensing that was developed as an alternative to the copyright system. Most works that are licensed as Creative Commons are free to use, but many have some sort of catch, such as attribution, no derivatives, or non-commercial use. Make sure you check what sort of CC license your chosen images are licensed under.
Pixabay
All images and videos on Pixabay are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0. You may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty-free for anything you like, even in commercial applications. Attribution is not required.
Flickr.com
Flickr.com has millions of images to search, but be careful! Not all images on Flickr are copyright free. To search for images with Creative Commons licenses, make sure you select "All Creative Commons" from the search menu.

Citations for Images and Works of Art

MLA Style Examples
APA Style Examples

Works Cited:

An Artwork Viewed in Person

Cameron, Julia Margaret. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 1866, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

An Artwork Viewed Online

Bearden, Romare. The Train. 1975. MOMA, www.moma.org/collection/works/65232?locale=en.

Illustrations:

When using an illustration in the body of your paper, if you provide full citation details in the caption text, you do not need to include a Works Cited entry for the illustration. Otherwise, include an entry in your Works Cited list with full publication details about the image as shown below.

Fig. 1. Joseph Yen, MURALS, 2008.

Works Cited example:

Yen, Joseph. MURALS. Flickr, https://flic.kr/p/5ckouD, 2008.

Need more info? Visit the MLA Style Center:

MLA Style Center | How to Cite an Image

Artwork in a museum or on a museum website:

van Gogh, V. (1889). The starry night [Painting]. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, United States. https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/vincent-van-gogh-the-starry-night-1889/

Figures:

To use an image as a figure in an APA Style paper, provide a figure number and title and then the image. Below the image, provide a copyright attribution in the figure note. In a presentation, the figure number and title are optional but the note containing the copyright attribution is required.

Example:

Figure 1
Murals

Note. From MURALS [Photograph] by Joseph Yen, 2008, Flickr (https://flic.kr/p/5ckouD). CC BY 2.0.

Also provide a reference list entry for the image in your References list. The reference list entry for the image consists of its author, year of publication, title, description in brackets, and source (usually the name of the website and the URL).

Yen, Joseph. (2008). MURALS [Photograph]. Flickr. https://flic.kr/p/5ckouD

Need more info? Visit the APA Style Blog: